V-Announcements: We’re Back!

We've been Buysse

I have to tell you, there is very little that gets me as aggravated as having Velominati go down. Its like having kids kicking down my sandcastle when I was a kid, watching helplessly as your labor of love collapses right before your eyes. We’ve spent the better part of the last month with the site staggering like a drunkard between being online, offline, and painfully slow. Its no way to live.

I’ve been unhappy with our host for a while, but I’ve been reluctant to move on because of the risk in changing platforms and the downtime associated with such a move. But, as my VMH cleverly pointed out on Sunday afternoon while I was tearing my hair out, I might as well take advantage of the downtime to change hosts. So we did.

After a careful evaluation, I settled on a WordPress-specific host called WP Engine. All these guys do is WordPress, and their servers are tuned specifically to the unique loads this platform imposes. They are like the Classics specialists of WordPress hosts. To my surprise, however, once I moved the site and data over to their platform even they couldn’t accomodate it without getting some of their specialists involved. I had a feeling Velominati imposed some unique demands on the platform, and it was a bit cathartic to have them express surprise over the volume of data we have. The Rules in particular has such a high volume of traffic and posts (several million hits a year and 11k posts and counting) that it simply causes things to choke. They also helped me find some optimizations in the code that helped reduce the load on the servers.

Part of the optimizations include changing how the photo upload tool works; you can still upload multiple photos into your posts, but the album tool is dead. I built that myself as a way to share photos with my family before we ever launched Velominati; it was never designed to support the kind of traffic we have here. So DM Albums is dead. Let us thank it for its service and wish it well. A-Merckx. On the plus side, you can now add captions to any photo you upload, so that’s kind of cool.

Anyway, we got it all up and running and last night I poured myself a stiff drink and flipped the switch on the domain name to point to the new boxes. Words can’t express my relief when I woke up this morning and everything was humming away nicely. We’ll give it a day or so before posting up new content just to make sure we’ve got everything squared away.

Its great to be back; let us know if you notice an improvement in site performance or anything that doesn’t seem to be working correctly. Vive la Vie Velominatus!

frank

The founder of Velominati and curator of The Rules, Frank was born in the Dutch colonies of Minnesota. His boundless physical talents are carefully canceled out by his equally boundless enthusiasm for drinking. Coffee, beer, wine, if it’s in a container, he will enjoy it, a lot of it. He currently lives in Seattle. He loves riding in the rain and scheduling visits with the Man with the Hammer just to be reminded of the privilege it is to feel completely depleted. He holds down a technology job the description of which no-one really understands and his interests outside of Cycling and drinking are Cycling and drinking. As devoted aesthete, the only thing more important to him than riding a bike well is looking good doing it. Frank is co-author along with the other Keepers of the Cog of the popular book, The Rules, The Way of the Cycling Disciple and also writes a monthly column for the magazine, Cyclist. He is also currently working on the first follow-up to The Rules, tentatively entitled The Hardmen. Email him directly at rouleur@velominati.com.

Next The Torch Song »

Previous « Five Face

View Comments

Chris says:

Feb 21 2015 at 1:08 am

@frank, truly fucking awesome that you're back. Keeping this thing running must be like trying to control some massive, inquisitive, mischievous toddler that never sleeps or stops trying to poke it's fingers into the sockets. Chapeau.

Don't get complacent though, no resting on your laurels, not too many stiff drinks, there's still The Gear and V-Caps to sort out.
unversio says:

Feb 21 2015 at 7:31 am
wilburrox says:

Feb 21 2015 at 5:45 pm

@frank

@ChrisO

Six weeks of recovery most of it with no Velominati.

Thank god there was still porn.

Oh, yeah. That’s the first +1 badge of the new site award sorted, then.

Cheers to that! +1 indeed. I can't imagine what all's involved. Both recovering from hip surgery and recovering from cranky servers.
wilburrox says:

Feb 21 2015 at 5:52 pm

@wiscot

@girl

Very nice to see the site back up and running. Nice work @frank. It would be interesting to see how everyone’s riding kilometres spiked since we clearly had more time to ride.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view, I live in Wisconsin. To say it’s been a bit nippy of late is an understatement. I think the high was like 4 degrees yesterday. Not. Riding. Weather. You know it’s bad when the weather guy on the radio says, unironically, “it’s going to warm up nicely to 16 degrees today.”

Still, I have 5 rides in this year which is 5 more than this time last year!

Man I feel for ya up there in the great white... I have to say that the weather down here in the deep south as well has helped to prevent any serious effort at being fit for the early season. And today's race, Southern Cross, 55 miles of forest road in N GA Mtns was postponed due to ice storm having knocked out power and made roads impassable. The dang daffodils are popping up and it's supped to be blue skies and sunshine down here in Alabama! It's cold.

Reminds me of the baby polar bear, asking his dad if he is 100% polar bear. His dad saying uhhh, ask your mom. Baby polar bear asks mom if he's 100% polar and momma polar bear says, of course you are 100% polar bear son, why do you ask? And baby polar bear says, 'cause I'm friggen cold mom.
Ben says:

Feb 21 2015 at 6:41 pm

Welcome back. We missed you!
ChrisO says:

Feb 22 2015 at 12:42 am

@Chris

Don’t get complacent though, no resting on your laurels, not too many stiff drinks, there’s still The Gear and V-Caps to sort out.

Too bloody right. No articles to write, no comments to reply to and he still hasn't sorted out the freaking caps.
markb says:

Feb 22 2015 at 7:05 am

@ChrisO

er, you might get a -1 coming your way? Anyway, how's the recovery coming on - been on the road yet, or still sticking to the turbo-trainer?
ChrisO says:

Feb 22 2015 at 8:16 am

@markb

I would gladly go back to being a mere Level 4 if it brought the Day of the Cap any closer.

Recovery is going well. If nothing else the great server outage has saved you all from regular updates.

I got out for a short ride on the weekend. Not much more than a few laps around the block to make sure I could still do it.

I've been doing quite a few hours on the trainer, and Zwift has been brilliant - a real sanity-saver but also very social.

Mostly 60-90 minute sessions but yesterday I did over three hours, which was 100km. Some guy in Japan did 300km in 11 hours. Tell you what, having not spent much time on trainers, I hadn't quite appreciated how hard it is when you don't do any freewheeling over that length of time.

Anyway I'm back in Dubai now and generally OK. The leg is fine in a straight line and if there's nothing sudden or slippy but I'm still limping around and not very nimble. Using the walking stick not so much for support but really to indicate to people that I can't leap out of their way while they walk along texting.

I've definitely reached the point where the gains are becoming ever more marginal. At some point it will stop but hopefully not for a little while yet.
Ccos says:

Feb 22 2015 at 1:28 pm

@frank

@Teocalli

@ChrisO

Hey, me saying “+1″ and awarding the badge are two different things. I expect everyone to be funny and clever and witty and a bit of a jackass (Rule #43) but the badge is only awarded if you truly outsize expectations.

I believe it was LeMan who said to expect 2-3 weeks to regain fitness after taking a week off the bike. Not sure how long my wittiness bit will take to recover after such a prolonged layoff.

Jackassness though has a way of persisting, even without regular use.
Kieran says:

Feb 22 2015 at 3:51 pm

Its great to see the site back and running much faster. I've been commuting to work 3-4 days a week (its summer downunder) and I found a new cycleway along the coast to avoid the traffic, so my motivation is high.